Amazon will ‘stiffen the backbone of EU regulators’ to rein them in, NYU professor says
There are mounting concerns Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is becoming too big and too powerful. One proponent of reining in the tech giant, NYU Stern Professor Scott Galloway, told the FOX Business Network’s Stuart Varney that despite owning Amazon stock and being a Prime member, “We have a company that can take the value of any consumer stock down 10% or 30% just with [a] press release. So, I think that’s dangerous because a component of a robust market is that no one company or person can control the markets,” Galloway said on “Varney & Co.”
According to Galloway, in an effort to pre-empt any actions by regulators, Amazon should spin off its Amazon Web Services [AWS] cloud business because two distinct companies would be “worth more to Amazon shareholders and would force Amazon’s retail unit to operate not at such a loss that puts such pressure on the rest of the retail ecosystem.”
If regulators step in to curb Amazon’s power, Galloway says it would more likely happen in Europe, because the U.S. benefits too much from big tech.
“Like all big conflicts over the last 100 years, the war against big tech is going to break out in continental Europe. No university buildings or hospital wings are named after Facebook or Amazon billionaires in Europe. They register…a fraction of the upside but a lot of the downside in terms of anti-competitive or job destruction which is going to stiffen the backbone of EU regulators.”
